Like the application of Chinese AI, Deepseek attracts it Hords of American usersManagers of the Trump administration, legislators and cybersecurity experts express their concern that technology could be a threat to US national security.
The introduction of Deepseek in the United States saw on Monday that it quickly became the most downloaded free application in the country on the Apple App Store. Deployment also shaken Wall Street while investors had trouble calculating the sudden appearance of a low-cost generative and open-source AI tool capable of competing with the main artificial intelligence applications such as Chatgpt of Openai.
NVIDIA’s actions, the American manufacturer of advanced chips designed for the development of the AI, fell 17%, cutting around $ 600 billion on its market value – a record of one day for an American stock.
These explosive beginnings were marked on Monday by the “wake up” of President Trump. Addressing journalists on Tuesday, the press secretary of the White House, Karoline Leavitt, said that the National Security Council would examine the potential national security implications around the launch of Deepseek, noting that the administration would seek to ” American domination of AI “.
Some legislators have also weighed in concerns concerning the access of application to American users.
“The United States cannot allow models of the Chinese Communist Party such as Deepseek to risk our national security and take advantage of our technology to advance their AI ambitions,” said representative John Moolenaar, a Missouri Republican Who chairs the selective committee of the bipartite house of the Chinese Communist Party, said Tuesday in a statement shared on social networks. “We have to work to quickly place stronger export controls on essential technologies for the Deepseek IA infrastructure.”
The projectors on Deepseek intervene in the middle of growing tensions on trade, geopolitics and other problems between the two superpowers. The United States has already imposed significant export controls on China in order to brake the production of semiconductor by Beijing used to develop an advanced AI, the most recent borders arriving December.
Safety threat to users
While Moolenaar calls could be the first idea of a possible repression of the congress, Ross Burley – Co -founder of the non -profit center for information resilience – warned that the emergence of Deepseek in the States- UNIS raises data security and confidentiality problems for users. Chinese law grants a great author authority in Beijing to access the data from companies based in China.
“More and more people will use it, and it will open the door to more and more personal data which is simply given to the [Chinese Communist Party] And be sent mainly to continental China to be able to inform them of their activities, “Burley told CBS News.
“What they will use for, these are behavioral change campaigns, disinformation campaigns, for really targeted messaging as to what the Western public looks like what they are doing,” he added .
Deepseek, which is based in the Chinese city of Hangzhou, notes in his privacy policy that the personal information he collects from users is owned “on secure servers located in the People’s Republic of China”.
Below policyThe company says that it collects information, including the “device model, operating system, models or striking rhythms, IP address and system language”. Deepseek also collects “information related to services, diagnostic and performance, including crash reports and performance newspapers”, according to the company.
A key difference compared to Tiktok
The fact that the Deepseek servers are based in continental China differentiates it from Tiktok, the social media platform belonging to Chinese who The Congress had sought to ban For national security reasons before President Trump signed an executive decree last week, leading the Ministry of Justice to Do not apply the law For a period of 75 days.
In order to mitigate American regulatory concerns, the parent company of Tiktok, Bytedance, in 2022 moving All of its American data has infrastructure belonging to American Software Maker Oracle.
The legislation prohibiting Tiktok – “protection of Americans against applications controlled by foreign adversaries”, which President Biden reported last April – grants the great scope of the federal government to repress technological platforms belonging to countries considered as American opponents.
Under this law, Congress may oblige a platform to sell its American operations from foreign property, and it can be closed if it is considered a threat. The law can apply to any platform that allows users to share content; more than a million monthly active users; belongs to a company located in a country foreign to the opponent; And was determined by the president to present a significant threat to national security.
But Deepseek can be considered less threatened since, unlike Tiktok, it is an open source model model, according to Matt Sheehan, a scholarship holder in China with Endowment for International Peace Carnegie.
“”[A] Many of these open source applications, open source models, you can actually use them directly on other platforms. Perplexity is a large American IA company, and they are currently using a version of Deepseek that you can use who does not have data confidentiality or security threats, “he told CBS News.
Censorship avocation?
A problem with which Deepseek users face outside China: censorship. For example, an analysis of CBS news from the application revealed that Deepseek had made no result for rapid search for 1989 demonstrations on Tiananmen demonstrations and the subsequent massacre in Beijing.
Burley of the Center for Information Resilience thinks that this deletion of information on an application downloaded by millions of users will pressure the decision -makers to act.
“I think that is the responsibility of Western governments – the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States – to watch and see if it is wise for the Apple Store and the Android Store to host this language model when ‘He is so clearly organized to push Chinese accounts and censorship, “he said.
